About

A bit about me, disclosing my biases

For me, essays are a good way for me to work through and organize my ideas. Once I write them down, my mind can stop spinning on them. These essays are mostly for my own benefit, but hey — other people might get something out of them too.

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I’m female, middle-class, white, born in 1999 and grew up in a liberal area of California. I have been relatively sheltered from misogyny in my life; I haven’t suffered any serious abuse, no first-hand experiences with men that have scarred me.

I’m a lesbian, and as such I am really pissed off at the state of the queer conglomerate and present. I thought I was asexual from ages 10 to 19. I had a bought of dysphoria around the time I was 14, and dabbled in the idea of a nonbinary identity, although I never actually made it part of my self-conceptualization, and thus don’t consider myself desisted or reidentified.

I wasn’t a “tumblr kid” in a strict sense (I did not have a tumblr blog as a teen) but I certainly lurked quite a bit, and I came in contact with a lot of maladaptive

I’m basically fairly gender conforming. Not strictly so (I’ve never shaved my legs; never worn makeup on the daily) but gender conforming in the normal, pick-and-chose way that most women are. Gender conforming enough that I don’t recall it ever being commented on by those around me.

As long as I can remember, I’ve felt a particular unease with feminism despite agreeing with the basic principles.

I was born into an era of third wave feminism, gaudy and irreverent, and that never sat right with me. I learned about radical feminism during the COVID pandemic, and second-wave type feminism feels so much more wholesome to me. It reminds me of old Girl Scout friends of my mom’s; solid, serious, stable, and strong.

But there’s more to it than that. In some renditions of feminism I’d come across (both 2nd and 3rd wave) posited that patriarchy and misogyny were everywhere, even if you couldn’t see it, turning it into a boogeyman of sorts. This seemed to encourage self-victimization. It also did not line up with my personal lived experiences.

Again, like an ideal deity, the ideal devil is omnipotent and omnipresent. When Hitler was asked whether he was not attributing rather too much importance to the Jews, he exclaimed: “No, no, no! … It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.” Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting.

The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, 1951

What I really liked about radical feminism was that — initially — it seemed to reject the idea of ever-present microaggressions. It said, “No, misogyny is the sex trade, male violence, the beauty industry, and gender ideology. And it’s not subtle; it’s extremely overt.” It acknowledged that great strides had been made in the past century in the West, and was women’s oppression was worse in some other countries.

But as I got further into radical feminism at it exists online, I found more extreme renditions of radical feminism that I didn’t jive with so much — ones that once again invoking misogyny as an invisible ever-present boogeyman.